@InProceedings{DalPalu:etal:CILC2004,
  author =	 {Dal Palu, Alessandro and Sebastian Will and
                  Rolf Backofen and Dovier, Agostino},
  title =	 {Constraint Based Protein Structure Prediction
                  Exploiting Secondary Structure Information},
  booktitle =	 {Convegno Italiano di Logica Computazionale 2004
                  (CILC 2004)},
  year =	 2004,
  pages =        {16-17},
  user =	 {will},
  abstract =	 {The protein structure prediction problem is one of
                  the most studied problems in Computational
                  Biology. It can be reasonably abstracted as a
                  minimization problem. The function to be minimized
                  depends on the distances between the various
                  amino-acids composing the protein and on their
                  types. Even with strong approximations, the problem
                  is shown to be computationally intractable. However,
                  the solution of the problem for an arbitrary input
                  size is not needed. Solutions for proteins of length
                  100-200 would give a strong contribution to
                  Biotechnology. In this paper, we tackle the problem
                  with constraint-based methods, using additional
                  constraints and heuristics coming from the secondary
                  structure of a protein that can be quickly predicted
                  with acceptable approximation. Our prototypic
                  implementation is written using constraints over
                  finite domains in the Mozart programming system. It
                  improves over any previous constraint-based approach
                  and shows the power and flexibility of the
                  method. Especially, it is well suited for further
                  extensions.},
}